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The comments about Gelsinger are interesting. I was at Carnegie Mellon in 2003 and he came to visit campus and gave a talk on his vision for embedding radios in a huge range of chips. It's pretty neat to see this finally coming into real products even if it took a long time to get there. I think the moral of the story is, if you don't think out ahead 10+ years, then 10+ years later you won't have all the cool stuff.Reply

Do they have a way to notify you if you get an email while your notebook is asleep? Otherwise what's the use of Smart Connect updating your email when you can't be notified? It could just sync as soon as you wake it up.Reply

With the move to ever shorter wavelengths the EM radiation gets more and more invasive. Are these 60 GHz things really safe ? I'm a techmology enthusiast, I use a cell phone, WiFi etc. but I'd be really hesitant to keep microwave band equipment permanently running in my own room, perhaps as close as the nightstand (a place where people might put down their tablet/notebook before going to bed) ... Reply

At the power levels WiGig is talking about, the waves won't be able to penetrate human skin (or likely even clothing). Given the limitations of the 60 GHz spectrum (LOS only, strongly attenuated in the atmosphere), it's not really a health concern.Reply

60 Gigahertz is completely safe (it's a 5 mm wavelength, water interacts with wavelength bands at 13.48 or 1.64 mm, so it's outside the strongest water absorption points; and of course microwave ovens are at the 2-3 gigahertz range, or 12 cm wavelengths, where water really interacts even more strongly, and we use that in phones and such with no problems; so this 5 mm wavelength is in a nice safe zone), and we aren't talking about pumping in kilo- or megawatts of energy into the waves either.

Even terahertz has not been shown to cause problems biologically. Then of course visible light is much higher frequency (shorter wavelength) than that. Only once you get to ultraviolate do you start doing potential biological damage. Reply

My point is that just because it's shorter doesn't mean it's going to do more damage. How much damage it's going to do depends on the properties of the target and obviously on how much energy is being put out. With enough intensity any wavelength light will do damage (eg. magnifying glass focusing sunlight). Microwave ovens operate in the same frequency range as WiFi and Bluetooth. The latter are considered safe as they have much lower power output.Reply

You take your Smart Phone, you set it down on your desk, it connects with the Monitor, oh wait that monitor has a powerful GPU in it!, it connects with an external HDD, game loads off the external HD, through the phones SOC and then the Monitors GPU. And while it's by the monitor it's also wirelessly charging it's battery.

Then in public places, touch based displays with charging integrated into tables, sit down, take out the phone, tap a connect button, but it pack in your pocket, surf and work off a 20inch screen while eating your lunch and charging your phone.Reply

By integrating functionality onto a single piece of silicon and reducing the number of chips a customer must buy, Intel is able to maintain/enhance it's profit margins while offering a tangible cost benefit to customers. This speaks directly to Intel's preferred strategy to out compete ARM and its ilk though the benefits extend past the mobile market. Others will follow in due course. However, the technology appears to scale well with process node. Even if someone else figures out a solution, it will not work as well unless they are able to match Intel's lead in process technology. While it is early to score this, it appears to be a pretty durable competitive advantage: it moves the game to Intel's strength.

While the technology is novel, the strategy is a recycled Intel classic.Reply